The Last Night of Fall
by PoeticJustice22
Summary: Another version of the classic tale about a lonesome woman trapped in a tower, contemplating on her past, present and fate, while waiting for her salvation in any shape or form... Will she ever escape?


**The last night of fall**

It is a late evening in the fall. Until now, everything has been silent and tranquil. The old tower which stands alone on the moor, behind the edge of the woods, is shrouded in solitude. The dark green climbers have penetrated the perishing rubble and climbed all the way to the upper window.

A young woman's pale face looks to the golden horizon, towards the fiery glow of the sunset. Her melancholic facial expression lacks the comfort and warm, yet it is so beautiful that many people would argue that she never has the need for these human emotions.

She sighs pensively, as the last life-giving rays of the sun disappear in the visible horizon. No more will she be able to see and feel this deep-red, burning sun …

This is the last night of fall.

Beyond the plain, the arising mist of the night is thickening, dense and extensive. As a cascading wave, it floods the wild moor, hits the edge of the woods, the obscure silence, and has soon covered everything underneath her. Far away the rooks and crows are crying their sad songs, as the fog slowly rises up before her as an enormous wave, just before it hits the shore. The woman throws her wistful eyes on it and senses the moistness and coldness hit her immediately, as it crashes against her.

Now it is as quiet as in the quiescent building of a burial vault. The cold is deteriorating, and all wildlife seeks shelter from the bitter night frost.

The clear light of the moon is now replaced by the stars, and the sky becomes darker.

As dark as the ink on her table, near the faded, blank paper. The room in the tower contains nothing else. Her bedchamber is far away from this silence which the night treasures. The lonely mind that she carries is never tired enough to sleep this remote sleep. She is imprisoned in this tower, with this embittered sleep for eternity.

The book on the table is worn, as the old horse on the field. Worn down by human through countless years. Tired of what, it seems to have been created for. The dream of a different kind of life has been something that you could not reach out for, something that was not possible to achieve before it fell into ruin and became an old, sad and vulnerable memory.

The woman had remembered the dreams, but they are no longer in her mind. She cannot any longer dream away to distant kingdoms, where the sun is always warm and the forest nymphs and elves wrap themselves in the last raindrops from the long autumn.

She cannot dream, because she is not where the people live. It is a saturnine atmosphere of being omitted from a life, she has never known.

She does not possess the joy or sorrow which leads to dreams, amazing dreams.

She has only herself now.

Once again she remembers – as if she was a child again — when her parents went away. The following day, they kissed her and reiterated time and time again that they would come back with a new brother to her.

But they never came.

She had waited and waited, had gone up in the chamber of the tower to gaze out over and beyond the godforsaken and barren moorland. But none came. She had cried herself to sleep every night, until she had forgotten why she lived. She stood by the window every day, in the hope of one day seeing two tired people driving in a horse-drawn carriage with a small boy, who seemed just as lonely and sad as her. A soul mate.

The woman smiles sorrowfully because she knows that none of them exist anymore. They have perhaps never existed for her. She has no hope, no joy, no more life.

She feels lost and forgotten in her own little mind, without imagination to remember the time when someone cared for her.

Her mind is withered, as the ageing honeysuckle, which hangs down from the ridge turret.

Once its flower smelled of the heat of the summer, and it had an inner glow, like no other equaled. But the cold is tough at this time of the year, and the honeysuckle has only little strength left to resist with. She cannot make it much longer either.

The night is receding and the day is slowly dawning. The fog is still lying around the tower, thicker and colder than before. The night frost on the window pane is small crystals which form fantastic fabulous monsters in numerous shapes. Nevertheless, she does not notice them.

She fixes her eyes on the book on the table. It is a book about dreams; that she knows for certain. She has read it again and again, several hundred times a day, but it can never quench her thirst for more.

The dreams in it tell the most marvelous adventures about happy people and their magnificent experiences. About little princesses who wake from a kiss from the prince on the snow-white horse, and about the evil lurking in every bush and every thicket.

She does not know if any of this could be her fate, and her disheartened mind cannot be comforted. She does not know why she is living, the only thing she can do is to gaze beyond the tableland and the dark tangle of the trees. She will try to hope, although she gave up hope many years ago.

It is brightening up on the horizon. A crow flies shrieking across the edge of the woods, which still remains hidden in the dark, and sails in large circles high above her head. Just then everything goes completely black for her eyes. Thousands of black crows fly close past the open window of the tower and the flutter of their wings and their throaty, almost beckoning calls resonate in the round, hollow tower until they are gone, once again.

Her eyes gaze beyond the plain again.

There, all of a sudden, she just discerns in the distance, a figure coming on horseback. He is large and gloomy as the night, yet like a shooting star, his armor blinks in the glow from the fading moon.

The closer they get, the more she can hear and see them: the horse's grunting breaths and its hooves beating against the rugged, hard soil, while the steam streams out of its nostrils. Its velvety, white mane lights up among the dark roses and their last cry for warmth, yet the horse does not seem tired after the long ride.

The horseman raises his sword in awe to the icy daybreak. The blade flashes sharply in the glow from the last moon which is lowered into the azure sea of the horizon.

It is a blade that can break any lock with a single stroke!

A savior, she thinks and sighs consoling.

A savior.


End file.
